Interview by Brad Balfour
Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
Director: Julien Temple
Opens December 4th, 2020
When veteran director Julien Temple made Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, he offered a deep dive into the life of MacGowan. The tortured Irish vocalist has been best known as the lead singer and songwriter of the Pogues — and co-creator of a timely Christmas classic, “Fairytale of New York.” MacGowan famously combined traditional Irish music (like jigs and reels) with punk rock’s visceral energy while lurching along into many wretched drunken incidents and system failures.
Temple’s rollicking love letter spotlights the iconic front man up to his 60th birthday celebration, where singers, movie stars and rock outlaws gathered to celebrate both the man and his legacy. Featuring unseen archival footage from the band and MacGowan’s family, as well as animation from legendary illustrator Ralph Steadman, and others, producer Johnny Depp joins Temple in exploring this shambolic character and his life to date in 124 minutes.
Kensington-born, multi-award winning director Julien Andrew Temple began his career with short films featuring the Sex Pistols In 1976. He continued with various off-beat projects, including The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners, Earth Girls Are Easy, and a documentary film about Glastonbury.
The 67-year-old Brit called in from London — he just had a birthday himself on November 26th — to enlighten all about the process of dealing with this chaotic creator and his convoluted Gaelic life. This Magnolia Pictures release debuted at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival and generally opens on December 4th, 2020.
Q: What makes you fascinated with rock history and the history of the people you focus on?
JT: I think about the musicians themselves, so my films use the music to look at the time and the place and the audience — why they like the songs and why they connect with the people involved with that kind of music. I see it in the form of social history and I see history beyond the future. If you don’t know your history, you don’t have much to go on.
Q: That makes sense. What were you most interested in finding out about from Shane?
JT: Shane is fascinating in many ways. The fact that he grew up in London but so strongly identifies with being Irish means that he has aspects of both cultures in him. That tension is one of the things that made the Pogues’ songs, or his songs for the Pogues, [which are] so great. I wanted to 
find out how he sees himself in terms of growing up between those two cultures.
I wanted to try and understand how he created priceless works. Shane is legendary for abusing certain substances and drinking, and how that leads him to the Irish literary tradition and what Shane calls mix artists — both using books as well as music.
Q: You learned about Irish culture through Shane’s eyes. What did you get about Irish culture that you hadn’t thought of before, or did it reaffirm things you already knew?
JT: I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, for sure. I was astonished, actually, at how rural and almost 18th-century, I would say, were Shane’s early experiences in Tipperary. You know… a farm without electricity, without water, when transport was a horse and cart. Those things in England were gone many years before. So there’s a kind of magic to his childhood. I think everyone invents bits about their childhood, that’s what makes them who they are. Shane tells almost a fairy tale, a bad-ass fairy tale, out of grace, out of time, which is fascinating.
Q: You have a unique way of looking at the musician’s mind. Your Joe Strummer film is totally different from the one you did with Wilko Johnson. And those are both very different from this film. Yet you establish links between the mind that creates music and the mind that makes these people. What do you look for, and what have you found that you think now, in looking back, is your through-line? At the same time, what do you do that makes these projects so different from each other?
JT: That’s a good question. It may sound strange, but in a way these films are slightly autobiographical, because they are about the time that I lived through and about the music that was played when I was relating to the world through the music. So there is a sense of working out the time I lived through on one level.
And the other thing I do is really tear up the rule book; I have no idea how I’m going to approach making this film. I really do like not knowing where I’m going with a film. I like to find the ways of solving it as I go along, and I like the detective hunt [going through] archives. I like what that tells you that you didn’t know before. If you sit down and write a [statement] about how you’re going to make the film, you’re missing the point. You need to [take a chance] and watch these forces shape the film in ways you didn’t expect.
Q: When you’re making the film, do you have an idea where and when you are going to animate, or does that all come after the fact?
JT: It comes after the fact. I was keen to use animation here because of two reasons. One, there are wonderful stories that we found on various micro-cassettes and basically there was nothing else to illustrate them with. You know, animation is a great way of telling a story that hasn’t been filmed or captured in any other way.
I was keen because there is a fairy tale element — even though it’s [like] a Grimm’s fairy tale at times — [involved when people try] to change conception of themselves. But also, [I like] to use very different styles of animation that are linked to different periods of time that we’re traveling through. Obviously, we have a very Disney-esque animation at the beginning. Then you have… There was a famous animated film of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in the ’50s. I used some of that style [as well]. It inspired the animated scenes on the farm.
[For the period of him] as a school kid, we have a famous comic strip here called “The Phenom” which was very popular in the ’50s and ‘60s when Shane was a kid. There was also a key figure, a famous figure, called Cluck who had this fang sticking out his dodgy teeth, very Shane-like. So it made sense to use that when he was a kid.
Then there is the more Robert Crumb-styled “acid trip animation” and the Jimi Hendrix psychedelic poster era [look]. I was interested in using a Japanese-styled anime [look] for the breakup of the band. We had fun playing with the different genres of animation to tell his story through the years.
Q: The great thing about it is that it makes a statement just by the look. One thing you understand even when you’re using audio and all these different elements is that you have to make them all flow [together]. How did you plan that?
JT: One of the things that shapes the film in these directions is how difficult Shane is as a subject. He’s a difficult guy for anyone to interview. There are reasons for that, but the fact that he didn’t want to do any regular sit-down interviews meant that we really did have to search for things that we could find him saying; in a way, that gave us some more feel for the film. What he was saying in a bar in Finland in 1985 is probably more unguarded and real than him sitting in a chair in front of a camera. And he hates us to force him into that chair.
So we have added conversations with various people to show his different facets. He is very complex, and contradictory, like most of us, at times, but a fascinating, fragmented kind of personality in many ways. I wanted to capture that.
One of the things that shaped the film I didn’t notice at first, but it had been staring me in the face was knowing that when you do an interview with someone, you cut out all the bits where the other guy — the interviewer — is talking. I was looking at Shane’s face while Johnny Depp was talking, and I was seeing so many emotions and feelings in [Shane’s] very expressive face.
Suddenly I thought, ‘I’m not going to throw that away, I’m going to use that.’ I’m going to create an idea that he’s listening to his own story as he’s told it at different times and how he tells it and changes it at different times and have him react to that. I found ways of just taking something that normally you’d throw away on the cutting room floor and make it the b
ackbone of the film. It was exciting and pleasing to find that solution.
Q: You couldn’t have a better producer on this kind of film than Johnny Depp. How did you and Depp figure out what role he would play beyond producer or name-lender to the project?
JT: Well, he was very keen to help the film get made and he was ready to do anything he could to help. They are very old friends. so Johnny suggested that if we do these conversations it would be great for him and Shane. They can interact in such a way that isn’t the case with, say, Bobby Gillespie or Gerry Adams or some of the other people [interviewed]. So he was really up for that. It took about eight hours in a confined space to film it — even though we ended up just using three minutes of it.
Q: Well, at least you know you have great archival material too.
JT: It was great to really search out the films that call back before the modern era, that could be the era that Shane grew up in. He’s right at the end of the old Ireland before it changed.
Q: Being born on Christmas Day must be a strange thing. Right from the film’s start, you brought that up. I’ve talked to others born on New Year’s Eve, or Halloween. It defines people in a way that they don’t even think about, but as they grow older the impact changes. What insights did you learned from a person — forget about it being Shane — born on Christmas Day, and how they see themselves?
JT: They can be very annoyed. They get one sock for Christmas and one sock for their birthday. That can leave a lasting grudge against the world, I think.
Q: So that might be what made Shane the way he is.
JT: I think it has an impact. He also produced “Fairy Tale of New York” which, any way you look at it, is a major milestone in Christmas songwriting. It’s a nice Christmas present every year as well. Making all those old socks he got as a kid.
Q: I interviewed former Pogues member Cait O’Riordan; she does Poguetry — a Pogues-inspired band. Though she’s not working with Shane now, he has had his impact on her, and on other people as well. What is it about Shane that gets under people’s skin?
JT: It’s been good and bad in various ways, depending on who you’ve been exposed to. But he’s a fascinating intelligence, and an honest man in many ways, but also deceptive in other ways. He’s a fascinating enigma. I have no interest in canonizing him or demonizing him. I just wanted to find these different facets and lay them out so people make up their own minds.
Interestingly, the Pogues wouldn’t talk. Maybe he’d have to ask them why. We asked them whether they would be in a conversation with Shane and we didn’t manage to land any of them.
Q: On other fronts… You made Absolute Beginners — a benchmark film — starring David Bowie. What did you see in Bowie that you had him play that role? I thought it was something that people didn’t see about Bowie at the time.
JT: Yeah, an interesting time for Bowie, because it’s when he was moving out of the roles he’d taken on, like Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke with these characters he portrayed through himself. He was being a little more without the real David Bowie and I was very very lucky to work with him at that time. He was a fantastic energy as everyone knows, and a great collaborator really open, sharing ideas. I sorely miss the guy. I thought he was the future, so I can’t believe he’s history, really.
Q: That’s true. You haven’t returned to something like Absolute Beginners, certainly it was a long time ago. Does it harm you or do you think it’s an exciting thing to have in your own history? I mean, you worked with David Bowie! But then you made such a mark with it, it’s hard to do anything else like it ever again.
JT: It’s interesting, because I had to leave England, I couldn’t get any work after Absolute Beginners.
Q: Really? I loved that movie.
JT: They accused me of destroying the British film industry. I had to get out, I couldn’t work. It was so hard for me to get financed here because of that film. It’s the same my whole career, actually.
But I’d like to get back to that. I’ve still got the energy to make all sorts of different films. I love the freedom in these kinds of films because there’s no one tells me what to do. I’d like to take some of the freedom into fictional, more narrative drama movies again. And I’m working on that, actually. So I’ve got a few projects, particularly one about the Brothers Pink, the Davis brothers; it’s a music drama.
Q: You’ve worked with so many different kinds of music stars, how do you decide what musical style or genre or reference you want to use?
JT: I’m someone who loves all music, whatever it is, as long as it’s good music. I’m really not listening just to one kind of music, it doesn’t really matter. I’m interested in making films through jazz, through [the musical], through rock ‘n roll. The only thing that’s made cheesy [and] called music I find hard, but even then, if there’s a window interesting me in something else, I’d still get involved.
But I like music that has something to say about the world and the people who make it, about their feelings, about things that matter to their time. I think it’s a vehicle for understanding where we’re all at a certain moment in time.
Q: There’s a whole new generation of Irish artists doing really new, interesting stuff. What have you discovered about present day Irish music, or music from the past, that you hadn’t known before that you can comment on?
JT: That’s one of the great things about making films: you can learn about stuff you can’t know in a very intense, very deep way. You really have to get lost in it. And I’d hardly scratched the surface of Irish music until I got involved in this film through Shane’s music.
I began to listen to all these people he was referencing and looking at them in a new way. Like the Clancy Brothers, Clannad, Dubliners — I re-evaluated them, I really didn’t understand how important those guys were. Going back to the Irish music, way back to the harpist, the blind harpist — what was his name? — perhaps the 17th century.
From there forward to now, I think it is a great time for big Irish music, big Irish bands. I love Blankham and Lisa Neal I think is a very impressive character. Again, they all owe a debt to Shane coaxing their music out of the museum in a way. He really did as he says, “give it a good kicking up the ass”. And it needed it. He gave it new life and young bands today still respect Shane for that.
Q: I think Shane understood the intersection of punk and Irish music. There have been other bands, like the Drop Kick Murphys, that have understood it as well. When you speed up the music to the dance rhythms, there can be that cutting edge to it — that what the band Black 47 does. What Shane really got about the music was to give it a punky, trashy feel that maybe wasn’t there in some of the more purist, folky stuff.
JT: I think Shane would argue that it was always there in the pubs at local get-togethers. That kind of rowdier edge was very much a part of the tradition and it had been somehow siphoned out of it. The other thing to remember about Shane is he was giving a voice to the London Irish. They hadn’t really been heard before. He gave them a platform and gave back the music that had been there before and they didn’t see that cross-fertilization of London music and Irish music, really. At that time, London music was punk music, very explosive.
Q: One guy you might think of in that vein would be Elvis Costello. There’s clearly some Irish elements to his music that you don’t realize until you realize how Irish he is.
JT: Many English musicians have a big Irish heritage. There is Morrissey, Johnny Rotten…
Q: John Lennon!
JT: John Lennon, yeah, of course. The Beatles. I think the Irish presence in English popular music is immense.
Q: You could do a whole book on it, coming from your film.
JT: It’s not a bad idea for a film about the actual Irish input into English popular music.
Q: What are you working on now? You have a fiction film you’re doing, and a musical. Do you have any other subjects for docs that you can talk about?
JT: Well, you never know if they are going to get made. But I’ve got this Kinks drama called “You Really Got Me.” I’ve got a big television project I’m talking about. Plus we’re doing a film about the city of Los Angeles, through the music from the beginning — the history of the city in music. There’s one about Detroit like that. I can always do one about New York.
Q: I also see you as doing some kind of animated series.
JT: Yeah! Tex Avery is my hero, really. He’s a great cartoonist from the ’40s. I think his humor is very punk rock, actually, very anarchic — [sort of] mad. I love his graphic, and his style. I love animation, I’d love to do that. So if anyone wants to hire me to do an animation series, I’m there.
Q: Where do you go from here? What happens with the film now in this new environment?
JT: It’s being released probably in December, in Ireland, England and the U.S. They’ve had a sensible approach to this virus, so they’re able to have cinemas open, they’re saying. That’s not the case in the UK. But I think there are some cinemas across the States that can show it. Obviously this whole thing is shifting to a streaming digital release simultaneously anyway, so that will obviously happen in these three territories.
Then, in the new year, we’re going to roll it out across Europe, and I think Australia is releasing it as well at the same time. Those are all countries where there’s an Irish concentration, with Irish-descended people, who know about Shane. So it makes sense to start things rolling there.
I love to think that Irish connected people in the United States would feel the film [captures] both the feel of the country and the power of Ireland and its culture that’s expanding, as well as tell Shane’s story.
Q: And how is the now-62-year-old Shane doing? He’s still in the wheelchair… how is he dealing with that?
JT: Well, it’s hard for him to get out; there is the hope that he will get up and walk again, and hopefully write new songs again. I think he’s still very keen to do that. He says that at the end of the film. As to whether he will be able to do so, [that remains to be seen].